Placing “Matter Out Of Place”: Purity and Danger as Evidence for Architecture and Urbanism Ben Campkin This paper revisits Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of
Pollution and Taboo (1966). A survey of this theory in architecture in the latetwentieth century reveals how it focused attention on relationships between dirt,
cleanliness, and the design and organisation of space – an area previously neglected in
architectural thought. Dirt remains an important focus within architectural and urban
theory, with implications for practice. Yet, the intersections that scholars of the 1980s
and 1990s made between Douglas’ work and critical theory, feminist and
psychoanalytic writings elicited problems with her structuralist approach that remain
unresolved. These are apparent in considering relationships between dirt and cities –
indeed, the aphorism Douglas invokes, ‘dirt is matter out of place’, originates in
discussions of nineteenth-century urbanisation. To better understand dirt’s
relationships with modern and late-modern capitalist cities, Douglas’ insights can be
productively read alongside post-structuralist accounts, including the psychoanalytic
notion of the abject and recent neo-Marxian scholarship on the production of urban
nature.
Correspondence: Dr Ben Campkin UCL Urban Laboratory University College London Wates House 22 Gordon Street London WC1H 0QB Email: [email protected] Twitter: @BenCampkin Web: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/urbanlab/people 1 Final manuscript of article accepted for publication in Architectural Theory Review 18(1), 2013.
Not to be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission. © Ben Campkin, 2013. Placing “Matter Out Of Place”: Purity and Danger as Evidence for Architecture and Urbanism Ben Campkin If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with
the old definition of dirt as matter out of place.1
-- Mary Douglas (1921‒2007).
Introduction
Few anthropological texts can have had so notable an impact outside of that
discipline, and on the discipline of architecture in particular, as Mary Douglas’s
Purity and Danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo, first published in
1966.2 Until the late 1970s, this text by Douglas – an exploration of social and
cultural systems through the evidence of the everyday, the excluded and the
prohibited – was itself considered marginal within the discipline of anthropology; and
later in life she revealed that she was disappointed with the immediate response.3
Subsequently, however, Purity and Danger went on to become an exemplar of the
power of theory to cut across disciplines, methodological approaches, and intellectual
positions; helping us to understand dirt in varied material and symbolic forms. This
text has productively opened architecture up to the broader fields of contextual
evidence considered within anthropological and material culture scholarship. In this
paper I will revisit a selection of Douglas-inspired architectural and urban scholarship
from the 1980s and 1990s, showing how her theory was used at multiple scales,,
from interior design to the urban fabric, in the process elucidating the relationship of
design to ideas of dirt and cleanliness.
For architectural theory and practice dirt remains a lively topic of debate
today.4 In this context, what does Douglas’s theory still offer, and particularly in
regard to urban questions? A brief survey of earlier interpretations of Douglas’s
theory will help us to identify some unresolved problems, as well as some
possibilities for our understanding of, for example, the displacements that operate
through contemporary neoliberal urban redevelopment and the ideological role of
2 Final manuscript of article accepted for publication in Architectural Theory Review 18(1), 2013.
Not to be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission. © Ben Campkin, 2013. architecture within its attendant socio-spatial practices of exclusion. Ultimately, what
I want to argue here is that it is in relation to capitalist cities and urbanisation that we
need to be most careful how we transpose or ‘apply’ Douglas’s theoretical account of
dirt. Since dirt is central within processes of urbanization, it is necessary to open up
a more hybrid theoretical terrain.
Dirt itself, for Douglas, is a subject that necessitates thinking across different
scales of evidence: from everyday materiality to language and cultural symbolism.
She looks to dirt to provide evidence for social and cultural systems, constructing
arguments about this macro scale through reference to information gathered during
empirical anthropological fieldwork, observations of the everyday, reflections on
anthropological and other bodies of theory, and ambitious comparisons between
different cultures and geographical contexts.
Douglas’s theory itself is often taken to be encapsulated in the six-word phrase
in Purity and Danger that has become its most famous idea by far: ‘dirt is matter out
of place’. There is a rhetorical certainty in this seductively simple formula, but what
kind of evidence is there to support it? The origins and interpretation of the phrase
raise some interesting problems of their own. It is often attributed to Douglas herself.
Yet, in the first edition of Purity and Danger it is unreferenced, and in later editions
Douglas referenced it to Lord Chesterfield – Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of
Chesterfield 1694-1773 – without giving an exact source. As Douglas’s biographer
Richard Fardon has noted, the phrase first appears in Douglas’s work in a volume of
fieldnotes from her second trip to study the Lele people in the Belgian Congo in 1953,
where she writes:
Asked to define dirt in England—Not earth, just simply [dirt]. Contrast: idea of
dirt, with ‘good clean mud’ etc. Chesterfield ‘Dirt is any matter displaced’ e.g.
hair, crowning glory etc. and hair in the soup. But child putting spoon it has
licked back in the veg. tureen and told off for being ‘dirty’. ‘Dirty’ is much
wider range than just ‘dirt’. Any bodily excreta, saliva, vomit, faeces, and
anything that has contact with them is dirty. Food is wholesome when served,
but as soon as someone has eaten a little, and left it, it is ‘orts’, remains, dirty.5
In this passage we see how Douglas interprets her own observations of everyday life
for the Lele people through reference to an idea recalled from her earlier education.
We also see the origin of some of Purity and Danger’s key themes, and in particular
3 Final manuscript of article accepted for publication in Architectural Theory Review 18(1), 2013.
Not to be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission. © Ben Campkin, 2013. the relationship – often contradictory – between symbolic and material dirt and
dirtiness. For Douglas, beliefs about what is dirty are determined through inextricably
linked bodily sensations, physiological and psychological processes. These appear to
be intuitive (‘an underlying feeling’) or natural.6 Yet there is no such thing as absolute
dirt – it is a matter of perception and classification. In this understanding, direct links
are made between physical states and social codes, between the material and the
metaphorical. Oscillating between different understandings of where thought or
perception reside, this approach encompasses tensions at its heart between
structuralist and phenomenological understandings of dirt.
Frustrated by the lack of an original source for the ‘matter out of place’ phrase, in
writing this paper I sought advice from Fardon.7 However, neither Fardon, nor the
anthropologist Alan Macfarlane, was able to find a precise reference, and so far we
have not located any version of it in Chesterfield’s writings. Based on his work as her
biographer, Fardon also observes that Douglas was in general careless with
referencing. The cultural theorist Steven Connor recently quoted Lord Palmerston –
Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, 1784–1865 – as having addressed the
Royal Agricultural Society using a similar phrase in 1852: ‘I have heard it said that
dirt is nothing but a thing in a wrong place. Now, the dirt of our towns precisely
corresponds with that definition.’8 For our purposes, it is interesting that Palmerston
here refers to the phrase in relation to the urban environment. Furthermore, as Connor
has pointed out, the quote indicates that the phrase was a commonplace, ‘which
means that it is hard to pin down or put in its proper place’.9 It seems most likely that
Douglas had heard the aphorism somewhere and misattributed it, in the process
inventing her own, more concise and catchier, version. Numerous authors have
subsequently popularised Douglas’s phrase, often attributing it to her, in spite of her
reference to Chesterfield.10
What is the value of this dictum as a frame for thinking about dirt or the social
systems through which it is controlled? It is almost too easy to repeat it without
further critical reflection or contextualisation: it becomes reified. Even if we accept
the argument, numerous writers since Douglas have observed, as Fardon notes, ‘that
the formulation is not reversible: all matter out of place is not dirt’.11 For Douglas, as
the cultural theorist William Cohen writes, ‘Pollution is not simply the opposite of
cleanliness; it also arises out of a confusion of categories’.12 Yet, as a definition,
‘matter out of place’ works against this, suggesting dirt to be a stable and clearly
4 Final manuscript of article accepted for publication in Architectural Theory Review 18(1), 2013.
Not to be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission. © Ben Campkin, 2013. defined category, rather than a catchall and relative term, and implying a simple
binary understanding of the boundary dirty/clean.
It is still useful to think of dirt in terms of placement and displacement, and there is
of course more to Douglas’s theory than its best known phrase might at first suggest.
For Douglas, dirt is ambiguous and anomalous, causing anxiety through disrupting
classification systems and the ‘normal’ ordered relations that one understands the
world through; hence, in an essay from the mid-1970s in which she developed the
arguments of Purity and Danger, she writes:
For us dirt is a kind of compendium category for all events which blur, smudge,
contradict, or otherwise confuse accepted classifications. The underlying feeling
is that a system of values which is habitually expressed in a given arrangement
of things has been violated.13
As may be expected for a structuralist thinker, for Douglas these accepted
classifications are necessarily binary, so that ‘reflection on dirt involves reflection on
the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to
death’.14
Writing in the tradition of structuralist social anthropology, Douglas read
individual pollution beliefs and behaviours, observed through texts and fieldwork, as
evidence for understanding social systems. Purity and Danger demonstrates an
interest in how culture is embedded in ‘the concrete, the mundane’, and at a more
abstract level in the ‘collective ordering of social life’ through systems of
classification.15 Architecture – such as the huts of the Lele – served for Douglas as
one category of material evidence to contribute to a ‘total’ anthropology. In this the
researcher embedded herself within an environment characterised by its ‘otherness’,
often for years at a time, in order to understand people in relation to the region in
which they lived, their kinship relations, their politics, language, economy,
technologies and so on. In her methods and preoccupations Douglas was influential
in the development
of the field of material culture studies within the discipline of
anthropology. In the present moment, it is notable that material culture scholarship is
intersecting in creative ways with the disciplines of architecture and architectural
history, in the process contributing more fine-grained contextual understandings of
architecture’s place within social systems, and its agency in relation to other forms of
material culture.16
5 Final manuscript of article accepted for publication in Architectural Theory Review 18(1), 2013.
Not to be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission. © Ben Campkin, 2013. Douglas’s specific method was in some ways a radical departure from her
predecessors and teachers in structuralist anthropology. Most remarkably, it featured
comparison between dirt constructs and pollution behaviours observed in her 16
months of fieldwork with the Lele, and those of the modern west – often rendered
through analogies drawn from her own experience, home life and environment. Later
in her life Douglas would attribute this to the fact that she was housebound with
mumps and looking after her two children when she wrote the book. Emphatically
ordinary, often domestic, metaphors are deployed, suggesting the value, as evidence,
of the banal matter of dirt itself, and opening up the topic, in particular, to readers in
Douglas’s immediate social milieu.17 It was through this approach that an
uncomfortable reality was exposed: modern western conceptions of dirt, and
responses to it, though naturalised and presented as rational, paralleled the
superstitious practices attached to primitive religious rituals.18
In this comparative method Douglas’s theory followed the model of religious
social anthropology set out by Émile Durkheim (1858‒1917), whose ideas had
influenced her teacher at the University of Oxford, E. E. Evans Pritchard (1902‒
1973). In placing Purity and Danger within the context of anthropology, we should
also note that Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908‒2009) had already questioned the
categorisation of ‘primitive’ societies as inferior to modern Western ones, arguing for
commonalities between the ‘savage’ mind and the ‘civilized’ mind.19 In the
contributions that Douglas made to the emerging field of social anthropology during
her lifetime, it was an important aspect of her work that she bridged between these
different continental European and Anglo-American schools of anthropological
theory.
In Purity and Danger we see
how Douglas draws evidence and analogies from
everyday domestic life – that for her, dirt as matter and index operates between the
everyday and the ontological. The tendency to ground the broad category of ‘dirt’ in
the terrain of domesticity, as well as an openness to a plurality of meanings derived
from a given classification system, mean that Douglas’s work does not fit comfortably
in the canon of structuralist anthropology.20 Rather than a grand meta-theory of dirt,
the reader of Purity and Danger is presented with what Douglas describes as
‘homely’ arguments.21 In her preface to the last edition of Purity and Danger printed
in her lifetime (2002) Douglas reiterated her view that ‘everyone universally finds dirt
offensive’, while the way it is defined will depend on localised classificatory systems.
6 Final manuscript of article accepted for publication in Architectural Theory Review 18(1), 2013.
Not to be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission. © Ben Campkin, 2013. However, she also described the book’s arguments as ‘convoluted’, and noted that it
‘made society sound more rigid than it really is’.22 Although she argues that the
definition of dirt is in flux according to different cultural and historical contexts, for
Douglas the idea of ‘dirt’ and our reactions to it are constant. Is this not itself an
ahistorical and paradoxical assumption, and an assumption which obscures the
changing materialities, effects and perceptions of dirt across time and space? Though
challenging to our systems of categorisation and value attribution, dirt clearly does
have ‘a place’ within those systems. As Cohen says, ‘contradictory ideas – about filth
as both polluting and valuable – can be held at once’ (see page 4, above).
Furthermore, even when tidied up, put ‘in place’, some kinds of dirt may retain their
threat.
Theories of dirt are in essence theories of order if one accepts Douglas’s view that
there is no such thing as dirt without classification.23 This central interest in order and
disorder and their spatialisation finds parallels in the work of Douglas’s
contemporaries, such as Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, whose poststructuralist
writings on order and heterotopia have played a more prominent role in subsequent
architectural, urban and spatial thought. Foucault and Douglas have been read
alongside each other in geography and cultural theory, if not in architecture.24
Although Foucault’s and Lefebvre’s work have had a more obvious and wider
influence in directing subsequent scholars to examine social and spatial processes of
exclusion and displacement, Douglas’s thinking was also important in this.
The symbolic emphasis in Douglas’s understanding of dirt leads her to underscore
the visual and spatial characteristics attached to pollution belief systems and
practices.25 Prohibition is discussed in terms of borders and boundaries, and threats to
those borders and boundaries. In her preface to the final edition of Purity and Danger
produced in her lifetime Douglas again places emphasis on the spatiality of her
subject, writing that ‘Taboo is a spontaneous coding practice which sets up a
vocabulary of spatial limits and physical and verbal signals to hedge around
vulnerable relations’.26 In eliminating dirt of all kinds, Douglas argues, we are
involved in a perpetual spatial and visual process of arranging and rearranging the
environment, ‘making the world conform to an idea’.27
It follows, then, that there are many areas of spatial investigation in which
Douglas’s ideas on dirt, and other theories of excluded and degraded matter, may be –
and have already been – useful, in terms of both physical spaces and spaces of
7 Final manuscript of article accepted for publication in Architectural Theory Review 18(1), 2013.
Not to be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission. © Ben Campkin, 2013. representation. At the most literal level, the arguments put forward in Purity and
Danger are valuable in the analysis of spaces or infrastructures specifically identified
as ‘clean’ or ‘dirty’, or constructed to deal with unwanted or polluting matter, such as
sacred spaces, medical buildings, bathrooms, or dumps, sewers and cemeteries. Ideas
of pollution and strategies for dealing with contaminated materiality are, of course,
central in discussions of ecological urbanism and the re-use of ex-industrial buildings
and landscapes. Ways of thinking about the ordering of space and specific buildings
of different scales are also suggested within this theoretical discourse – zoning and
partitioning. The spatialised discussion of prohibition, transgression and punishment
provides a platform for exploring the role of the built fabric as a reflection of, or an
instrument in the production of, individual, social or cultural ordering systems.
Related to this point, beyond practices of hygienism, maintenance, cleaning and waste
management, such theories may enable us to better understand the underlying sociocultural and psychological impulses driving the imposition of different conceptions of
order and disorder on specific buildings, whole city districts, or urban conditions; or
the socio-economic, symbolic and physical ‘sanitization’ processes associated with
urban redevelopment and gentrification.
Purity and Danger in action
A brief survey of five examples of Douglas’s theory as it was used as evidence in
architecture and urbanism in the 1980s and 1990s suggests its potentials and limits,
and some ways that we might now reorient interdisciplinary work on dirt. Underlying
this selective survey – taking some of the most subtle and extended articulations of
Douglas’s work in the fields of architecture and urbanism – is a concern with how we
might understand urban dirt, in particular, and dirt in late modernity, where in
certain spheres the excluded and degraded stimulate creativity, or are revered or
celebrated.
Firstly, consider the architectural historian Adrian Forty’s exploration of the
modernist aesthetics of cleanliness in design and interior design history. In Objects of
Desire: Design and Society Since 1750 (1986) Forty demonstrates how Douglas’s
theory can be productive in demystifying the ideologies underpinning modernist
hygiene reform and its accompanying products and aesthetic tropes.28 He examines
the ‘imagery of exaggerated hygiene’ incorporated into the designs of household
objects and interiors, emphasising how these objects actively influenced behaviour
and produced new understandings and perceptions of dirt, especially dust. Forty
8 Final manuscript of article accepted for publication in Architectural Theory Review 18(1), 2013.
Not to be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission. © Ben Campkin, 2013. shows how the design of specific things and interiors arose from particular Western
ideas about dirt and cleanliness, and how practices and aesthetics were shaped by
constructions of class and gender. Building on Douglas’s theory, he emphasises how
the reform of cleaning methods was transmitted through emotional – as well as
rational and scientific – arguments, to the benefit of the wealthier classes. Middleclass hygienists mobilised cleanliness, through hygiene reform, as a means of social
control, and to ensure the health and longevity of a productive proletariat.29
This example illustrates the creative possibilities of using Douglas’s theory – and,
indeed, the ‘material culture studies’ anthropological approach, which prioritises the
evidence afforded by everyday things and spaces, and that was in part her legacy – to
elucidate design in general, and hygiene aesthetics and domesticity in particular. Yet
it also highlights that Douglas’s own account in some ways worked against its own
call for cultural specificity, omitting in its comparative approach an appreciation of
the contradictory roles of dirt and pollution taboos within industrial capitalism. As
Forty demonstrates, hygiene reform is used to reorganise and discipline the poor, and
this is enacted spatially, from the micro-architectural to the city scale, and naturalised
through everyday artefacts.
Connecting with Forty’s reading of the gendered construction of pollution taboos
in domestic contexts, the feminist architect and theorist Katherine Shonfield
emphasises Douglas’s preoccupation with pollution rules as mechanisms to protect
the overall form of society:
Douglas’ view is that pollution taboos – rules in society that guard against the
unclassifiable, the impure and the hybrid – have a physical expression. This
emerges from an image of social well-being as synonymous with clearly
delineated physical form, a form which is habitually counterpoised against a sea
of potentially threatening and polluting formlessness.30
Through texts and installation projects such as ‘Purity and tolerance’ at the Economist
Building in London, Shonfield collaborated with muf architects and others to directly
employ the ideas in Purity and Danger, interspersing theory with fictional narratives.
‘Purity and tolerance’, for example, saw Shonfield inserting a shiny bulging ceiling
into a ground floor interior of the Economist Building, alongside a text inscribed onto
the window at street level which drew an analogy between the building’s cladding and
sanitary towels. The point was to draw attention to the ‘refusal of both to
9 Final manuscript of article accepted for publication in Architectural Theory Review 18(1), 2013.
Not to be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission. © Ben Campkin, 2013. acknowledge in the rigours of their form the presence of the liquid, i.e. the
formlessness of both blood and water’.31
In these works, Douglas’s theory is utilised to imaginatively undermine tropes of
order in iconic modernist architecture, and its material, constructional and aesthetic
tenets. Shonfield describes brutalism as itself a ‘quest for purity, expressed by taboos
against pollution’ that ‘permeates architectural and urban practice’.32 Her
extrapolation from Purity and Danger again reinforces the spatiality of Douglas’s
theory, and its potential to inform critical readings of architectural modernism.
Importantly – if implicitly – they highlight the universalising tendency underlying
Douglas’s theory. She conceives of culture as ‘the public, standardised values of a
community’, and of universes based on ‘general principles’, assuming shared and
agreed rules, codes and ideas across a homogeneous society.33 The argument that
‘classifying is a human universal’ is a core weakness of Douglas’s work, constituting
an unreflexive variant of a general theory of universality.34 These characteristics of
Purity and Danger are in tension with Shonfield’s feminist deconstruction of
modernism. It is also important to note that Shonfield’s work creatively used
‘dirtying’ as a method in design and writing. This is certainly in tune with Douglas’s
own idiosyncratic and transgressive approach to academic work in which she
emphasised ‘energy in the margins and unstructured areas’.35
Mark Cousins’s articulation of ‘the ugly’ provides another extension of Douglas’s
work on dirt that, like Shonfield’s, takes it as evidence to elucidate architectural
aesthetics, within a psychoanalytic theoretical framework.36 His discussion of ugliness
builds on Douglas’s spatialised understanding of pollution, but interjecting a
heightened sense of movement between given categories and states. He writes that:
in so far as dirt is matter out of place it must have passed a boundary, limit or
threshold into a space where it should not be. The dirt is an ugly deduction from
‘good’ space, not simply by virtue of occupying the space, but by threatening to
contaminate all the good space around it. In this light, ‘dirt’, the ugly object, has
a spatial power quite lacking in the beautiful object.37
As opposed to Douglas’s more static understanding of the category of dirt in a rigidly
structured world, in Cousins’s extrapolation the dirty (ugly) object is not just ‘matter
out of place’ but, being animate or potentially animate, embodies a power to spread.
Furthermore, in this theory ugliness is at once excluded from, and also a ‘moment’ in
10 Final manuscript of article accepted for publication in Architectural Theory Review 18(1), 2013.
Not to be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission. © Ben Campkin, 2013. the unfolding of, beauty, within a process of creative production.38 These arguments
are useful in conceiving of the dynamic relationships between, for example,
‘blighted’ urban districts, categorised as degraded or polluted, and the purer antitheses
they threaten. Cousins argues that such ‘negative constructions’ provoke in us a
reminder of mortality and ‘a kind of horror’.39 In addition, Cousins points to the
ambivalent role of dirt in art and architectural aesthetics. We might usefully extend
this line of thinking to capitalist urbanisation, with dirt of various kinds as the raw
material of creativity, part of a creative act of production. In this sense we can
conceive of dirt – both material and symbolic – as intrinsic to cycles of ‘creative
destruction’, to use the economist Joseph Schumpeter’s phrase for describing the
incessant processes of wealth creation, destruction and reconstruction fundamental to
capitalism in its variegated forms.40 Douglas’s theory appears ill equipped to deal
with the material and metaphorical uses of ‘dirt’ in the production of the city, or its
production through forms of urbanisation that are cyclically and simultaneously
destructive and creative.
In a further example of spatial theory from this period, the negative social
consequences of stigmatising constructions of dirt were a central focus of geographer
David Sibley’s interpretation of Douglas in Geographies of Exclusion: Society and
Difference in the West (1995). With interests in socio-spatial mechanisms of
regulation, Sibley examines images of dirt and cleanliness in media discourses
encircling stigmatised places and communities, aligning Douglas’s conception order
and prohibition with Foucauldian notions of exclusion.41 In his account of ‘landscapes
of exclusion’, Sibley is able to show how the spatial marginalisation of matter
becomes inextricably linked with the spatial marginalisation of groups of people who,
for one reason or another, do not fit comfortably within society’s dominant bourgeois
social and cultural value systems. Reading Douglas’s ideas on prohibition through
Foucault enables Sibley to disentangle the complex and often inconsistent operation
of ideas about dirt and cleanliness as they shift between discursive and material
realms, impacting on particular social groups, where Douglas’s own more rigid
approach often seems to lack an overt criticality or political position.
A final architectural example of the ‘application’ of Douglas’s theory, this time
directly exposing how problematically it reads when we think at the urban scale in
late capitalist cities, is provided by the psychogeographic cultural historian Patrick
Wright’s A Journey Through Ruins: The Last Days of London (1991). Wright’s book
11 Final manuscript of article accepted for publication in Architectural Theory Review 18(1), 2013.
Not to be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission. © Ben Campkin, 2013. draws on Purity and Danger in its discussion of the social, physical and cultural
landscape of London’s neglected lower-income Dalston neighbourhood under
Thatcherism in the early 1990s.42 Wright reads Douglas’s notion of dirt as ‘the
domain in which all […] differences are lost’, a broad conceptual category for that
which lies ‘outside of a culture’. In this he again asserts the value of the excluded and
marginalised as evidence, here in an intuitive experiential urban anthropology of
degraded and ordinary city streets.43 Yet, constructing his historical account of the
city through observations made while walking Dalston’s streets, he is critical of
Douglas’s and other abstract ‘elegant theories about dirt’ for their detachment from
everyday life, and the political and economic structures that shape it.44 The
implication is that urban dirt first has to be understood in relation to the particular
material conditions – poverty, neglect, ruination – of specific locales: in this case
Dalston. His extension of Douglas’s ideas is once again suggestive of tensions
between structuralist and phenomenological, symbolic and everyday, understandings
of dirt inherent in her account. The implication is that, in the context of the late
modern city, the tensions and contradictions between what sociologist Carol
Wolkowitz has recently termed ‘postmodern and/or poststructural dirt […] purified
through abstraction’ and ‘the idea of “real dirt”’, are increasingly apparent.45
This brief survey illustrates how Douglas' theory has provoked architectural,
urban and spatial thought.
These examples show how it has operated as an
interpretative frame for thinking about questions of dirt, and varied forms of material
evidence for its presence, and its treatment within architecture and urbanism. Put to
work within these texts the observations developed in Purity and Danger implicitly
evidence a ‘gap’ in architectural, spatial and urban thinking around constructions of
dirt, which in distinct ways each cited author set out to address. Yet through a close
reading of the alignments these authors make between Douglas’s arguments and
critical theory, psychoanalytic theory, feminist and other poststructuralist accounts,
we notice weaknesses and inconsistencies in Douglas’s theory, as well as certain
positive aspects that have generally been underplayed. Although dirt has returned to
the architectural agenda, and as a subject for cultural debate, the theoretical concerns
of the 1990s have not been adequately resolved.46
12 Final manuscript of article accepted for publication in Architectural Theory Review 18(1), 2013.
Not to be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission. © Ben Campkin, 2013. Purity and Danger in the city
Moving forward, then, and building on these earlier interpretations of Purity and
Danger, a hybrid conceptual framework is required for thinking about different kinds
of situated evidence for understanding dirt’s relationships with architecture and cities.
Caution is required in transposing Douglas’s discussion of cultural symbols and social
phenomena rigidly organised according to religious structures to any new context.
This is particularly true in thinking about urban dirt within the specific dynamics of
capitalist urbanisation in different times and places. The view of the dirty/low as
constitutive of the clean/high is important in classic nineteenth-century accounts of
dirt and disorder in the modern socially and spatially stratified European city.47 In
‘post-industrial’ neoliberal urbanism, on the other hand, we have to account for the
juxtaposition of low and high class land uses, and the use of stigmatising rhetoric and
double-speak in the categorisation of areas as dirty in order to legitimise their
redevelopment.
As the geographer Guy Baeten has argued, these dystopian discourses
conceal the ‘complex and contradictory realities’ and underlying inequalities that
structure urban life.48 Urban dystopia serves as the ideological basis for creative
destruction. It is therefore important to understand the way that these dystopian
constructions operate over time through focusing on specific cases.
In contemporary Western cities such as London, where there is a fascination with
the representation and experience of edgy, degraded, ‘dirty’ urban neighbourhoods,
we also need to develop a more sophisticated conceptual frame for understanding
dirt’s relationship to design and aesthetics. Think of the conversions of abandoned
former industrial buildings typical in neoliberal regeneration. Such buildings have
often featured design strategies that enhance, rather than conceal, the material textures
of their use and pollution, and their qualities of decay. In such contexts Douglas’s
theory does not offer much insight. Instead, a range of Anglo-American studies of
‘grunge aesthetics’ (Hal Foster), contextual post-industrial ‘dirty realism’ (Liane
Lefaivre), the ‘aesthetics of recycling’ (Giuliana Bruno); ‘junkspace’ (Rem Koolhaas)
and the ‘urban pastoral’ (Julian Stallabrass) are useful; alongside work on the cultural
and economic revaluation of industrial spaces and iconographies.49
As an object of study, produced through aggregate phenomena, urban dirt calls for
an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that elucidates practices of exclusion as
they operate simultaneously across different material and social registers. Combining
a material culture studies approach with post-Freudian psychoanalytic and neo13 Final manuscript of article accepted for publication in Architectural Theory Review 18(1), 2013.
Not to be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission. © Ben Campkin, 2013. Marxian models of thinking about dirt may offer new possibilities to address the core
weaknesses in Douglas’s theory and the complex intersections between the material
and the symbolic that she observes.
Purity and Danger is imbued with psychoanalytic concerns, focusing as it does on
relationships between subjectivity, culture and society, as manifest in prohibition and
taboo. For Freud, whom Douglas describes as a ‘magisterial figure’, along with order
and beauty, cleanliness constituted one of the three prerequisites for the progress of
civilisation. He writes that:
There is an unmistakable social factor in the cultural striving for cleanliness
[…] which is later justified on grounds of hygiene, but manifested itself before
this connection was appreciated.50
The ‘urge for cleanliness’ accompanies man’s evolution into an upright posture,
setting him apart from animals. The emergence of ‘proper’ responses of shame and
disgust to excrement – ‘organic repression’ – provides key components of the
development of the libido.51
Yet while Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalytic explorations of dirt and
cleanliness in architecture have developed Douglas’s arguments in important ways,
they have largely been confined to discussions of specific architectures of hygiene,
rather than being extended to an urban context.52 There is still potential in developing,
for example, Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection in relation to urbanisation and urban
experience, conceiving of the city as a place where we are continuously forced to
negotiate the abject – ‘what disturbs identity, system, order’ – and actively exclude
it.53 Kristeva developed her theory in relation to Georges Bataille’s notion of
‘abjection’ in the essay ‘Abjection et les formes misérables’ (abjection and forms of
wretchedness), building directly on Douglas’s account of dirt.54 Where, for Douglas,
in response to dirt we are all involved in a perpetual spatial process of arranging and
rearranging the environment, abjection is a more violent expulsion of that which is
deemed threatening or repulsive.55 In the formation of subjectivity, the abject causes
strong and apparently ‘natural’ reactions: a ‘revolt of the person against an external
menace from which one wants to keep oneself at a distance – it may menace from
inside’.56 These can range from physiological disgust responses to a rotting object to
the moral repulsion prompted by news of a horrific crime. 57
14 Final manuscript of article accepted for publication in Architectural Theory Review 18(1), 2013.
Not to be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission. © Ben Campkin, 2013. Abjection refers to spatialised processes through which the subject, or society,
attempts to impose or maintain a state of purity. Importantly, the concept accounts for
a level of ambivalence on the part of the subject – the abject may attract as well as
repel. Through the notion of ‘spaces of abjection’, Kristeva’s concept has been put to
use, in particular, to examine the relationships between marginalised people and the
places they are associated with.58 The idea of abjection is a powerful notion with
which to underpin our thinking about the various displacements performed in the
name of urban change.59
The abject, in contrast with interpretations of Douglas that polarise the binary
between ‘dirty’ and ‘clean’, leaves more room for the idea that: ‘filth, under certain
circumstances, might surprisingly be a good or enjoyable thing’;60 that one might
desire to see and experience abject spaces; that the marginalised may exist next to the
mainstream, the excluded next to the included, and that degeneration might be
produced within processes of regeneration. Abject urban spaces necessitate such an
interpretation in accounting for interactions between notions of material, spatial,
psychological and social degradation and systems for imposing, or attempting to
achieve, purity. Responses to stigmatised public spaces – including obsessive
surveillance, the patrol of boundaries – parallel the process of abjection at a collective
scale. For Douglas, the rejected is also powerful and fascinating, but Kristeva’s notion
of the abject articulates this more clearly.
In addition to anthropological perspectives, and psychoanalytic accounts, another
body of work is relevant to thinking about urban dirt: that which adopts an implicit or
explicit neo-Marxian theoretical position in the investigation of the production and
discourses of urban dirt, degradation and stigmatised spaces within neoliberal
urbanisation.61 These scholars, rooted in a Lefebvrian tradition of thinking about order
and classification in relation to the city, have emphasised the social relationships
underpinning the production of different forms of urban dirt and waste matter, relating
them to the material and discursive production of nature.
For Marx, as for Freud, dirt is also constitutive of ‘civilisation’, but for him it is
produced within, and integral to, industrial capitalism:
Light, air, etc. – the simplest animal cleanliness – ceases to be a need for man.
Dirt – this pollution and putrefaction of man, the sewage (this word is to be
15 Final manuscript of article accepted for publication in Architectural Theory Review 18(1), 2013.
Not to be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission. © Ben Campkin, 2013. understood in its literal sense) of civilization – becomes an element of life for
him. Universal unnatural neglect, putrefied nature, becomes an element of life
for him [original emphasis].62
Isolated from the Promethean technologies that effect the civilising transformation of
nature, the worker is forced to live in and on dirt, on the ‘putrefied nature’ that is the
by-product of industrialisation.
Working on urban nature and infrastructure from a neo-Marxian perspective in
urban geography, Maria Kaïka and Erik Swyngedouw’s discussion of ‘urban trash’
provides an evocative theoretical departure. Drawing on the work of Mike Davis,
these authors articulate a wide range of forms of urban dirt antagonistic to the ‘clean
and sanitized’, visually and spatially orderly, high modern utopian city ideal. On a
geographical level, they suggest, there are close relationships between the spatial
distribution of different kinds of waste matter, things, excluded people. They describe
diverse phenomena that transverse material and metaphorical forms of ‘urban trash’,
emphasising the complex ways in which these are intertwined.
Unlike Douglas, for whom ‘dirt’ replaces the commodity in unlocking the meaning
of a social system, neo-Marxian analyses of dirt and degradation are firmly rooted in
the political, economic and historical dynamics behind the production of particular
urban spaces and conditions.63 For Swyngedouw and Kaïka:
Perpetual change and an ever shifting mosaic of environmentally and
socioculturally distinct urban ecologies – varying from the manufactured
landscape gardens of gated communities and high technology campuses to the
ecological war zones of depressed neighbourhoods with lead-painted walls and
asbestos covered ceilings, waste dumps and pollutant-infested areas – still shape
the choreography of a capitalist urbanization process.64
The suggestion is that, in the context of the late modern city, such juxtapositions are
becoming more intense and more visible. Pollutants are themselves seen to have a
historically, culturally and geographically specific ‘nature’. Analysing these
contemporary urban ecologies will require us to understand the ‘choreography’ of
earlier phases of capitalist urbanisation. It may be productive to make connections, for
example, between the discourses focused on public health and industrial and organic
wastes in the nineteenth century, twenty-first century bacteriological and
16 Final manuscript of article accepted for publication in Architectural Theory Review 18(1), 2013.
Not to be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission. © Ben Campkin, 2013. environmental concerns and socio-spatial practices of exclusion as they operate
through contemporary ‘regeneration’.
In conclusion, if we pay close attention to the uses of Douglas’s theory as
evidence in architectural, spatial and urban analysis, we note that Purity and Danger
both opens and closes down debate. On the one hand Douglas’s approach opens up
architecture and urbanism to interdisciplinary thinking and bodies of contextual
evidence that prioritise the cultural significance of the everyday and the excluded.
However, Douglas’s theory contains unresolved tensions between material and
conceptual evidence, and between dirt as matter or symbol, and these are at the heart
of dirt as a research trope. This is nowhere more clear than in cities and processes of
capitalist urbanisation, and in late modernity, where dirt and urban degradation are
celebrated and aestheticised, even while the social and material displacements of
regeneration accelerate at an increasingly rapacious rate. We will be better placed to
think beyond Douglas’s idiosyncratic structuralism and stimulate new
interdisciplinary research on this topic if we work across material culture,
psychoanalytic theory and neo-Marxian theories of nature within urbanisation.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Laurence Douny and Richard Fardon for discussing Douglas’s work with
me. I am grateful to Matthew Gandy, Rebecca Ross and the editors and referees of
this journal for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.
17 Final manuscript of article accepted for publication in Architectural Theory Review 18(1), 2013.
Not to be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission. © Ben Campkin, 2013. Notes
1
Mary Douglas, Purity and danger: an analysis of the concepts of pollution and
taboo, London: Routledge, 2000, first published 1966, p. 36.
2
As an example of the general esteem for this book, the UK’s national broadsheet the
Sunday Times included it in a survey of “Makers of the 20th Century” (1991) among
the one hundred most influential nonfiction works since 1945;
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article1805952.ece (accessed
08 April 2009).
3
Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. xviii; Richard Fardon, “Obituary: Dame Mary
Douglas”, The Guardian, 18 May 2007; Alan Macfarlane, interview with Mary
Douglas, February 2006 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xl3oMdIRFDs (accessed
20 December 2012).
4
See, for example, the recent landscape architecture publication Megan Born, Helene
Furján and Lily Jencks with Phillip M. Cosby (eds), Dirt, Philadelphia and London:
PennDesign and The MIT Press, 2012.
5
Richard Fardon, ‘Margaret Mary Douglas 1921–2007’, Proceedings from the British
Academy, 166 (2010), pp. 135‒58, p. 154.
6
Mary Douglas, ‘Pollution’, in M. Douglas (ed.), Implicit meanings: essays in
anthropology, London: Routledge, 1975, pp. 47‒59, p. 51.
7
This exchange is written up in Richard Fardon, ‘Citations Out of Place, or, Lord
Palmerston goes viral in the nineteenth century but gets lost in the twentieth’,
Anthropology Today Vol. 29, No. 1, February 2013, pp. 25‒26.
8
Anon., ‘The Royal Agricultural Society’, The Times, 21169, 16 July 1852, p. 8.
9
Steven Connor, ‘Smear campaigns’, A talk given at the Unclean Beings symposium,
Wellcome Collection, London, 16 July 2011
http://www.stevenconnor.com/smearcampaigns/ (accessed 19 December 2012).
10
For an example of the misattribution of the quote see the catalogue to the Wellcome
Trust’s recent exhibition, Dirt: the filthy reality of everyday life, London: Profile
Books, 2011, p. 2.
11
Richard Fardon, Mary Douglas: an intellectual biography, London: Routledge,
1999, pp. 76, 117.
12
William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson (eds.), Filth: Dirt, Disgust and Modern Life,
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, p. xi.
18 Final manuscript of article accepted for publication in Architectural Theory Review 18(1), 2013.
Not to be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission. © Ben Campkin, 2013. 13
Douglas, “Pollution”, p. 51.
14
Douglas, Purity and danger, p. 6.
15
James Wuthnow et al. identify these interests as characteristics of Douglas’s
approach to culture; James Wuthnow, Davison Hunter, Albert Bergesen and Edith
Kurzweil, Cultural analysis: the work of Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel
Foucault, and Jurgen Habermas, Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984, p. 78.
16
See, for example, Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas (eds), Archaeologies of the
contemporary past, London: Routledge, 2001.
17
See, for example, Douglas’s domestic references to shoes, cooking utensils and
bathrooms; Douglas, Purity and danger, pp. 47‒8.
18
Jonathan Culler, ‘Junk and rubbish: a semiotic approach’, Diacritics, 15, no. 3
(1985), pp. 2‒12, p. 2.
19
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman, New
York: Atheneum, 1973 (1955).
20
Wuthnow et al., Cultural analysis, p. 83.
21
Douglas writes that ‘The background of daily life in nursery and kitchen may
explain why the metaphors are homely’; Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. xi.
22
Douglas, Purity and Danger, pp. xi, 1.
23
Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. xvii.
24
Michel Foucault, The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences,
London: Routledge, 2003 (1970); David Sibley, Geographies of exclusion: society
and difference in the west, London: Routledge, 1995; Wuthnow et al., Cultural
analysis.
25
Culler, ‘Junk and rubbish’ p. 84; Elizabeth Shove, Comfort, cleanliness and
convenience: the social organization of normality, Oxford: Berg, 2003, p. 2.
Douglas’s preoccupation with cultural ordering systems, space and signification
continued to occupy a central position in her later work which bridged the
methodologies of anthropology and literary criticism. This was evident, for example,
in her reading of the structure of the text of Leviticus as a spatial ‘picture poem’
representing the proportions of the Tabernacle and Mount Sinai. Mary Douglas, ‘How
I got to where I am: from anthropology to “literary criticism”’, Mary Douglas
Seminar Series, Unpublished, University College London Institute of Archaeology
(2005).
26
Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. xiii.
19 Final manuscript of article accepted for publication in Architectural Theory Review 18(1), 2013.
Not to be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission. © Ben Campkin, 2013. 27
Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 2. In her understanding of taboo, Douglas drew on
the work of the anthropologist Franz Steiner, who had been her teacher at the
University of Oxford; Franz Steiner, Taboo, New York: Philosophical Library, 1956.
28
Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: design and society since 1750, London: Thames
and Hudson, 1986. For an alternative discussion of hygienism and whiteness in
architecture, see Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: the Fashioning of
Modern Architecture, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
29
Karl Marx, Economic and philosophical manuscripts, Early Writings,
Harmondsworth and London: Penguin/New Left Review, 1992 (1844), pp. 359‒60.
30
Katherine Shonfield, ‘Glossing with graininess: cross occupations in postwar
British film and architecture’, The Journal of Architecture 3, no. 4 (1998), p. 356.
31
Katherine Shonfield, ‘Two architectural projects about purity’, in Jonathan Hill
(ed.), Architecture: the subject is matter, London: Routledge, 2001, p. 37.
32
Katherine Shonfield: Walls Have Feelings: Architecture, Film and the City,
London: Routledge, 2000, p. 154; Shonfield: ‘Two architectural projects about
purity’, p. 37.
33
Douglas, Purity and Danger, pp. 48, p. 62.
34
Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. xvii.
35
Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 137.
36
Mark Cousins, ‘The ugly (part 1)’, AA Files, 28, 1994, pp. 61–6; ‘The ugly (part
2)’, AA Files 29, 1995, pp. 3‒6; ‘The ugly (Part 3)’, AA Files, 30, 1995, pp. 65‒8.
37
Cousins: ‘The ugly (part 1)’, p. 63.
38
Cousins: ‘The ugly (part 1)’, p. 62.
39
Cousins, ‘The ugly (part 1)’, p. 63
40
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, New York: Harper
Perennial, 2008 (1942), p. 83.
41
Sibley, Geographies of exclusion; for comparison in architecture, see Gil Doron,
‘The Dead Zone and the Architecture of Transgression’, City: Analysis of Urban
Trends, Theory, Culture, Policy, Action 4, no. 2 (2000), pp. 247‒63.
42
Patrick Wright, A journey through ruins: the last days of London, London: Radius,
1991. Dalston in northeast London is currently subject to intensifying processes of
gentrification.
20 Final manuscript of article accepted for publication in Architectural Theory Review 18(1), 2013.
Not to be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission. © Ben Campkin, 2013. 43
Wright, A journey through ruins, pp. 241, 237.
44
Wright, A journey through ruins, p. 31.
45
Carol Wolkowitz: ‘Linguistic leakiness or really dirty? Dirt in social theory’, in
Ben Campkin and Rosie Cox (eds), Dirt: New Geographies of Cleanliness and
Contamination, London: I.B. Tauris, 2007, pp. 15-24, p. 15.
46
See, for example, Wellcome Trust, Dirt: the filthy reality of everyday life, London:
Profile Books, 2011; and Born, et al. (eds), Dirt.
47
For example, Stallybrass and White explore metaphors of height and visibility in
the mapping of the city by writers such as Chadwick, Mayhew, Marx, Engels, Freud,
Baudelaire and Dickens. They argue that ‘the axis of the body is transcoded through
the axis of the city, and whilst the bodily low is “forgotten”, the city’s low becomes a
site of obsessive preoccupation, a preoccupation which is itself intimately
conceptualised in terms of discourses of the body’; Peter Stallyrass and Allon White,
The politics and poetics of transgression, London: Methuen, 1986, p. 145. In this
period, as evidenced through the texts of reformers, novelists and other urban
commentators, new social hierarchies and spatial boundaries in urban space
(high/low, suburb/slum) are both instituted and transgressed; Stallybrass and White,
The politics and poetics of transgression, p. 127. However, geographer Steve Pile has
recently problematised the tendency to overemphasise the vertical hierarchical
organisation of urban space in relation to dirt and waste matter, in which the
underground is equated with the lowest forms of filth. The sophistication of
underground networks, Pile emphasises, provides an index of urban progress
equivalent to tall or spectacular structures; Steve Pile, ‘The un(known) city… or, an
urban geography of what lies buried below the surface’, in Iain Borden, Joe Kerr, Jane
Rendell and Alicia Pivaro (eds), The unknown city: contesting architecture and social
space, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001, pp. 262‒79.
48
Guy Baeten, ‘Hypochondriac geographies of the city and the new urban dystopia’,
City 6, no. 1 (2002), pp. 103‒15, pp. 111‒12.
49
Guiliana Bruno, ‘Ramble city: postmodernism and Blade Runner’, OCTOBER 41
(1987), pp. 61–74; Hal Foster: ‘Why all the hoopla?’, London Review of Books 23/16,
2001, pp. 24–26; Rem Koolhaas, ‘Junkspace’, OCTOBER 100 (2002), pp. 175‒90;
Liane Lefaivre, ‘Dirty realism in European architecture today’, Design Book Review,
17 (1989), pp. 17‒20; Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s,
London: Verso, 1999.
50
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its discontents, London: Penguin, 2002 (1930), p.
41, n. 1.
51
Leo Bersani, The Freudian body: psychoanalysis and art, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986, p. 17.
52
Lorens Holm, ‘eS aitcH eYe Tee’, The Journal of Architecture 12, no. 4 (2007), p.
428; Nadir Lahiji and Daniel S. Friedman, ‘At the sink: architecture in abjection’, in
21 Final manuscript of article accepted for publication in Architectural Theory Review 18(1), 2013.
Not to be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission. © Ben Campkin, 2013. Nadir Lahiji and Daniel S. Friedman (eds), Plumbing: sounding modern architecture,
New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997, p. 42.
53
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an essay on abjection, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982. Kristeva writes (on p. 4) that ‘It is thus not lack of cleanliness
or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does
not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’.
54
Georges Bataille, ‘L’Abjection et les formes misérables’, in Georges Bataille (ed.),
Essais de sociologie, oeuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard, 1970; Kristeva: Powers of
Horror. According to Fardon, Douglas did not feel that Kristeva’s theory had added
significantly to her own.
55
Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 2. Steve Pile describes the process of abjection
thus: ‘Children learn to displace dangerous or unwanted feelings onto others – others
who are perceived to be different. These feelings are simultaneously social, bodily
and spatial […] In abjection, senses of revulsion over bodily materials and feelings
are established. The subject wants to expel whatever is reviled, but is powerless to
achieve it: thus, for example, the desire to be completely clean all the time cannot be
achieved, purity cannot be maintained. Abjection, then, is a perpetual condition of
surveillance, maintenance and policing of impossible “cleanliness”.’ Steve Pile, The
body and the city: psychoanalysis, space and subjectivity, London: Routledge, 1996,
p. 90.
56
Kristeva, quoted in Buchli and Lucas (eds), Archaeologies of the contemporary
past, p. 11.
57
Jennifer Robinson, ‘Feminism and the spaces of transformation’, Transactions of
the Institute of British Geographers: New Series 25, no. 3 (2000), pp. 285‒301.
58
In a number of spatially oriented disciplines such as cultural studies, geography,
architectural and art history, scholars have used Kristeva’s theory to examine spaces
of abjection, marginalised communities and the spatiality of hygiene. See for example
Victor Burgin, In/different spaces: place and memory in visual culture, London:
University of California Press, 1996; Lahiji and Friedman, ‘At the sink’; Anne
McClintock, Imperial leather: race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest,
London and New York: Routledge, 1995; Barbara Penner and Olga Gershenson (eds)
Ladies and gents: public toilets and gender, Philadelphia PA, Temple University
Press, 2009; Robinson, ‘Feminism and the spaces of transformation’; Sibley,
Geographies of exclusion; Robbert D. Wilton, ‘The constitution of difference: space
and psyche in landscapes of exclusion’, Geoforum 29, no. 2 (1998), pp. 173‒85;
Henry Urbach, ‘Closets, clothes, disClosure’, in Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner, and
Iain Borden (eds), Gender space architecture, London and New York: Routledge,
2000, pp. 342‒52.
59
See Ben Campkin, Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture,
London: IB Tauris, forthcoming 2013.
60
Cohen and Johnson, Filth, p. xxviii.
22 Final manuscript of article accepted for publication in Architectural Theory Review 18(1), 2013.
Not to be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission. © Ben Campkin, 2013. 61
Baeten, ‘Hypochondriac geographies of the city’; Matthew Gandy, ‘The Paris
sewers and the rationalization of urban space’, Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers, 24, no. 1, 23‒44; Matthew Gandy, Concrete and clay: reworking
nature in New York City, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002; David Gissen,
Atmospheres of late-modernity: the urban production of indoor air in New York City,
1963-2003, unpublished Ph.D dissertation, Department of Geography, University
College London, 2007; David Gissen, Subnature: architecture’s other environments,
New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009; Maria Kaïka, City of flows:
modernity, nature and the city, London and New York: Routledge, 2005; Kaïka and
Swyngedouw, ‘Fetishizing the modern city: the phantasmagoria of urban
technological networks’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24/1
(2000), pp. 120–38; Erik Swyngedouw and Maria Kaïka, ‘The environment of the city
… or the urbanization of nature’, in Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (eds.), The
Blackwell Companion to the City, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, pp. 567–80.
62
Karl Marx, ‘Economic and philosophical manuscripts’, in Karl Marx, Early
Writings, London: Penguin/New Left Review, 1992 (1844), pp. 359‒60. Thanks to
Nicholas Beech for pointing me to this quote.
63
Wuthnow et al. write that ‘For Mary Douglas the artifact is simple, obvious and
everyday, much like Marx’s commodity and Durkheim’s totem’; Wuthnow et al.,
Cultural analysis, p. 85.
64
Swyngedouw and Kaïka: ‘The environment of the city…or the urbanization of
nature’, p. 570.
23 Final manuscript of article accepted for publication in Architectural Theory Review 18(1), 2013.
Not to be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission. © Ben Campkin, 2013.